The hype surrounding a possible presidential campaign by the Dallas Mavericks owner is basically growing by the day. Among a list of potential celebrity challengers for President Donald Trump in 2020 that already includes Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Oprah, it’s Cuban whose resume most closely mirrors Trump’s.

Perhaps that’s why even the slightest mention of Cuban as a possible candidate — it’s happening more and more often these days — sends people into a frenzy of speculation.

Even Trump’s own son is weighing in this week in response to a Buzzfeed News story about Cuban considering a run.

Some of the latest news regarding Cuban and the White House came from an interview he did at The New York Times DealBook Conference on Thursday where he confirmed — yet again — he’s considering running but said he hasn’t committed to anything because of his family.

“I’ve got three kids,” he said. “What caring, loving parent, would put an 8, 11 and 14-year-old child through this?”

In the interview, Cuban also discussed the sort of campaign he might wage — and said he would not run as a Democrat.

“Republican before Democrat,” Cuban said. “Most likely independent because I think there is an incremental value for setting up an independent candidacy. Now I understand the difficulties of that and the challenges of that from an infrastructure perspective. The positives for doing it as a Republican means you get to go head-on with Trump right in the primaries. There’s nothing I’d have more fun doing. The benefit of being an independent is you go right to the golden ticket time. If I get enough support in the polls then I get to participate in the debates.”

Cuban played up the idea in a segment on “The Jim Jefferies Show” on Comedy Central on Tuesday, too. Jefferies asked the “Shark Tank” star to announce his candidacy on his show, but Cuban declined.

On Friday, adding even more fuel to theories about a possible campaign, Cuban confirmed to The Daily Beast that he keeps in touch with Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Cuban says he “texted with him a few time[s]” but that none of the texts, as far as he could recall, had “been more than one full sentence.”

The Daily Beast reported, however, that four sources familiar with the pair’s conversations revealed that Bannon has been encouraging him to run as a Democrat in 2020. Cuban brushes this off, and in a tweet pointed to an interview Bannon did with TMZ as the source of all the speculation about the two of them.

Cuban kept all this attention on him by starting a political discussion with his followers on Twitter on Friday.

Speculation and talk about Cuban running for president has been as high as ever on social media this week.

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